The President’s signing of the Law on the State Register of Voters welcomed

The Committee of Voters of Ukraine is pleased that the President has signed the Law on the State Register of Voters. The law was passed in February, in compliance with recommendations from the Council of Europe Venice Commission.

Human rights groups have, at the same time, pointed out that it is only the beginning of the process towards eliminating vote rigging during elections.

According to the law, the voter register will be made up of both nationwide and local lists of voters in an electronic database which will be maintained by the Central Election Commission. A spokesperson for the

Committee of Voters of Ukraine, Oleksandr Chernenko said in an interview that the abolition by the deputies during the process of passing the law of the system of an individual number for each voter would not ease the work of the electoral commissions nor the registration of voters. The expert did on the whole praise the law, but said that the creation of a register of voters would take a long time. “A year or more will be needed. If there are early elections, it will simply not be physically possible to achieve. There isn’t the financing for that”. Previously the Head of the Central Election Commission Yaroslav Davydovych estimated the cost of creating a nationwide register at eighty million UH.